Tracking ancient glass production in India: elemental and isotopic analysis of raw materials

Abstract

In India, the organization of the ancient glass industries that produced, starting around the mid-1st millennium BCE, huge quantities of small drawn beads that were traded both locally and all over the Indian Ocean and beyond, is poorly known. Elemental compositions conducted on glass beads found in India and on Indian beads found elsewhere show a great variability that could be linked in some cases to different production regions (Northern, Southern, and Western India). However, a more precise provenance attribution and the identification of regionally distinct production centers was not possible without additional research. Ethno-historical references show that glass was often produced from one single ingredient, called reh. We collected raw material samples from selected regions within the subcontinent. This paper reports on both the elemental compositions of these raw material samples obtained using laser ablation-inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry and their isotopic compositions including Pb, Sr, and Nd. The results were compared to elemental and isotopic data available for known Indian glass artifacts recovered from sites within and outside India. Our results show that some regions within India are more likely than others to have been the loci of glass production in ancient times.